Decorating

Kitchen trends with staying power

If there’s good design behind it, trying something different will last

The white quartz counters also found in the CHEO dream home are on trend and timeless.

Photograph by: Jean Levac
, Ottawa Citizen

There is good design and then there are trends.

The first is thoughtful, something like a sleek black dress showing off the best assets of the body. The second is frothy, sometimes frivolous, much like a knockout silk scarf in tones of hot pink. A season later, the black dress remains and the hot silk turns to a daring lime green.

Switch from the runway to the construction site and it's a similar story.

"Good design is good design," says Steve Barkhouse, an award-winning custom builder and president of Amsted Construction.

"Trends are different. You can focus on a different material, but the design is still key," says Barkhouse. Take his ultra-modern home on Bristol Avenue in Old Ottawa South that won a trio of awards for top green renovation, a customized bathroom and a serene kitchen at last month's Housing Design Awards. Barkhouse couldn't stop laughing while explaining how he tried to warn an über-cool Montreal architect behind the home that a journalist (me) was going to call, asking for a list of what's hot in kitchen trends.

Maxime Gagné didn't need the warning. "I am not a trend guy," says the partner in Laroche-Gagné Architecture Design, a firm specializing in green homes that transcend the technology to become beautiful.

A pair of Ottawa doctors hired Gagné to design the unusual white house and then commissioned Barkhouse to build it.

"Our design will age well," says the totally polite architect. "We are following a green concept, so we don't want to be tearing things down every 10 years or so and replacing them.

"We tend not to think in trends. Of course, we are subject to influences, but first we think of functionality, using clean lines, taking advantage of abundant daylight and nice materials."

Gagné, who teaches architecture at the University of Montreal, used a natural walnut on cabinets in the Bristol Avenue home. "It is a natural material. It isn't an oak stained a walnut colour. That is the beauty and the simplicity."

He repeated the walnut in the kitchen cabinetry, on the base of the kitchen island, on the front door and the face of a nearby coat closet, successfully pulling the eye from kitchen to entry, stopping to savour impeccable white quartz countertops.

"I do not feel the need for any more ornamentation," says Gagné.

"The materials tell the story in a kitchen that is also bullet proof for busy owners to raise their two young children."

Trade the word influences for trends and there is a swirl of changes happening in kitchen design.

While Gagné used small helpings of glossy white cabinets to add contrast to the natural walnut, many are playing with bold, high-gloss colours on cabinetry, especially green. Think of it as a new take on the avocado fridges and stoves of the '70s.

Caroline Castrucci, vice-president of Laurysen Kitchens and a woman who carries off flaming red, spiky hair, convinced Holitzner Homes to go with soft green cabinets in the kitchen of a single-family home on a slim lot in the Barrhaven community of Fraser Fields.

The colour push paid off dividends, with Laurysen and Holitzner winning honours at the design awards for the modest-sized kitchen with the bold personality.

"It's different. The colour pushes people outside of their comfort level with beige and brown," says Castrucci, who has been working in the family-owned company since she was 12 and was playing with colours, including aubergine cabinets, a few years back.

"It's totally inside my comfort level."

"I find this green very soothing. It is like spring — fresh and growing." In the next breath, Castrucci admits that only a small number of Holitzner buyers — about three per cent — share her colour preferences, asking to repeat it in their own homes.

That hasn't stopped IKEA from playing with colour, says spokeswoman Andrea Mills.

Several years ago, the retail giant introduced bright red glossy cabinets, a subtle ivory, a light turquoise and now a new take on green. "Some people go for an accent of colour, with a few coloured cabinets or they go all out with colour," says Mills, a public relations specialist in IKEA's Canadian head offices in Toronto.

"Colour is right on trend."

Daniel Gauthier, senior designer for Potvin Kitchens and the key supplier for kitchens in all of Richcraft's and Minto's homes, played with bold green cabinetry in his downtown condo a few years back.

"I love colour and always have had it. Life needs colour.

"What I also see is a lot of white on white," says the design brains behind the pared-down, classical French château kitchen at CHEO's lottery home outside of Manotick.

Simple cabinet shapes and shades of white have pushed aside the heavy helpings of creamy yellow cabinetry and heavy mouldings popular for several years, says Gauthier.

There are also lots of varying shades of grey, from silver to deep, dark charcoal, a tone custom builder Chuck Mills used on the ceiling of an award-winning kitchen at the design awards. "It just seems to disappear and go on forever," says Mills, owner of Chuck Mills Residential Design and Development Inc.

After colour, oversized hardware on simpler cabinets and white quartz countertops are finding wide support, including the spotlight in CHEO's lottery home kitchen. Gauthier's design colleague on the home, KISS Interiors owner Donna Correy, added long white glass tiles in the backsplash and chrome and glass lighting.

"It's modern with a classical touch," says Gauthier of the kitchen. The style appeals to Ottawa buyers, who have often been labelled conservative yet are showing off a moderate appetite for modern homes tucked into urban settings.

The modern reach is stretching to suburban settings, including Holitzner and Castrucci's green kitchen, which also comes with white quartz countertops and not a scrap of moulding or trim work.

Castrucci added a mirrored backsplash to make the space seem even bigger and motors (at $1,000 a pop) to power open cabinets with the light touch of a finger. The motors mean you don't need hardware, providing a smooth, clean surface.

Another hot influence in the world of kitchens is bamboo cabinets laid out on horizontal lines. The material is eco-minded and the lines bring the eyes down when ceilings are nine feet and higher, say Castrucci.

Horizontal banding is gaining popularity, especially with walnuts and other natural woods.

And many are abandoning upper cabinets for open shelves; something Castrucci predicts will become more common. The problem, says IKEA's Mills, is you have to be very neat most of the time and have a good collection of china to show off.

"Open shelves are asking people to be very organized," says Mills, who has watched a huge uptake in drawer and cabinet organizers to keep spoons separate from the forks and to keep spices neatly filed.

While natural light is a basic with Montreal architect Gagné of the modern white Bristol Avenue home, LED lights tucked under a shelf or inside a cupboard is a good supplement, says Mills. LED puck lights are also appearing on the base of upper cabinets, sending light down to a counter. The benefit is you don't need a valance to hide the light fixtures, says Castrucci, who has seen the elimination of valances in modern-styled cabinetry.

The hardest working components of a successful kitchen are the appliances — we do need to wash the dishes and a cool place to stash the milk — with stainless steel still the enduring king, says Jeremy Macintosh, manager of Universal Appliances.

"Stainless steel eats up 85 per cent of the market," he says, with white appliances representing 10 per cent of sales and black appliances five per cent.

Shapes have changed with refrigerators taller, wider and shallower. Thoughtful design also means shallow fridges fit into a counter, not protruding inches into the kitchen, he says.

At the recent launch of Gotham, a radical glass condo planned for Lyon Street in downtown Ottawa, developer Brad Lamb showed off the slim lines of a GE fridge, which was shallow and slender, fitting neatly into the thoroughly modern black-and-white kitchen.

"You don't want the appliance hanging out. That would be ugly," says Lamb.

Back on Bristol Avenue, Gagné would like to hide appliancesbehind wooden fronts, making them invisible to the eye, yet quietlyperforming their jobs. "Appliances can get gimmicky," says the architect, who turned to a bank of stainless-steel appliances.

Gimmickry or the ultra modern is not conducive to good design, says a proven master of clean, contemporary kitchens. Friedemann Weind-hardt is the owner of Design First and the man behind a winning bold and sunny kitchen at last month's design awards.

"There is a definite shift to contemporary design, but it's a shift to comfortable contemporary. Most people are not comfortable with stark designs," he says.

"They like to have their collections around them and comfortable contemporary is the comfort food of decor. They need to connect with the space. It needs to work."

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